Alice in Wonderland
Just seen the latest Tim Burton creation and what a disappointment. Yes, it has wonderful effects. Yes, its all very phantasmagorical and Mr Depp is adept at doing his usual stuff, though I didn’t quite understand why he had a Glaswegian accent; bit bizarre to say the least.
Unfortunately, despite it being Tim Burton, the film has ‘holywood dumb-down’ running all the way through it. Alice, originally, is not an immediately likeable character. She is cool, intellectual, snobbish, sharp and critical. Highly ambivalent as a main character. Which is probably one of the things which makes the original story so very interesting.
Tim Burton’s Alice is none of those things and instead is a walking stereotype of modern gender politics. She’s a ‘modern woman’ who refuses to marry a very badly portrayed man, because she is intelligent and strong and can ‘make her way just as good as any man’. Evidenced in the film as she steps into one masculine role after another before finally teaming up with a family relative to develop business activites in China. Just a completely bizarre and utterly unwarranted rewrite of the main central character of Lewis Carol’s Alice. Such a shame. It makes the film very boring and Alice so very anodyne and predicatable. She might as well have just stepped off the set of sex and the city.
Helena Bonham Carter is wasted as the red queen and as for Anne Hathaway as the white queen….why didn’t anyone tell her to stop waving her arms about in such an effected and annoying manner?
Overall - go and see it if you must. It’s worth it for the general feel of the sets. The twins are great, the speaking dog quite a likeable character and, er, that’s it. Oh, and don’t bother with the 3d either. You wouldn’t really know its 3d.
C’mon Mr Burton - you used to be so dark and genuinely original. What has happened to your story telling skills?
Esoteric explorations and non esoteric happenings.
